Today's motor vehicles can be equipped with various safety sensors, including for example, long range scanning sensors for adaptive cruise control, forward sensors for object detection, mid-range blind spot detection sensors, and long-range lane change assist sensors. More recently, sensors such as these have been integrated with on-board control units to provide traffic intelligence.
V2V (vehicle to vehicle) communications is an automobile technology designed to allow automobiles to “talk” to each other. Using V2V communication, vehicles equipped with appropriate sensors, processing hardware and software, an antenna, and GPS (Global Positioning System) technology can trade traffic data. Cars can locate each other, and can determine the location of other vehicles, whether in blind spots, blocked by other vehicles, or otherwise hidden from view.
The term “vehicle telematics” is another term used to define technologies for interchanging real-time data among vehicles. The field of vehicle telematics is quite broad, and when applied for traffic safety, is used in conjunction with standardized vehicle-to-vehicle, infrastructure-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure real-time Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) systems. This permits instantaneous cognizance of a vehicle to be transmitted in real-time to surrounding vehicles or to a remote monitoring station.